


guardians of a rare thing

by brampersandon



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Curtain Fic, Established Relationship, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-14 00:57:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13582635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brampersandon/pseuds/brampersandon
Summary: Home isn't about the city, the house, the things inside it. It's something formless, somehow the exact size and shape of Leo curved against his chest.





	guardians of a rare thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [neyvenger (jjjat3am)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jjjat3am/gifts).



> happy chocobox, julija!! pretend this is not obvious please. i luff yoooou :*
> 
> title comes from _riches and wonders_ by the mountain goats.

It's a two hour drive to Milan.

Less than that if the traffic is good, less still if Gigi pushes the speed limit, but in general — two hours. He doesn't mind it. As nice as it would be to lean back and catch up on his reading on the train, that's more trouble than it's worth — he keeps hoping that at some point, retirement will flip the magical switch that lets him move around the world anonymously again. Of course, he can't really remember what that was like, and he's not sure he'd know how to handle a return to that sort of normalcy— regardless. It's good to have the drive to sort through his thoughts.

Because he's been making this trip with steadily increasing regularity for nearly two years, and it's still a tangled, snarled thing.

 

 

 

 

(The first time he steps into the house, he tells Leo it's big. He repeats it the second time, and the third, and on and on down the line until Leo tells him to stop. Yes, it's a big house. He's aware. He bought it. He likes it that way. He _knows_ , Buffon.

Gigi knows Leo nearly better than he knows himself. He's familiar with the way Leo can misstep, land himself in a hole, and stubbornly refuse to give up his pride by insisting that he always meant to do that. 

He lets it go.)

 

 

 

 

There is a small part of him that will always ask, every time he gets in the car, why he does this. Leo's not the first person to hold a piece of Gigi's heart in his palms and walk away with it. Not the first one to call him in the middle of the night one month after an ill-conceived transfer, scrabbling through the dark for some reassurance that he did the right thing. Not the first one to say he misses him. Certainly not the first one Gigi's ever missed.

Gigi can look back on his career with a certain degree of satisfaction, even if he never wanted it to end, and with hindsight firmly in place he can acknowledge that most everything he struggled with was of his own doing. When you carry club and country on your shoulders, it's easy to overextend, to turn yourself into everything for everyone. If he tried to partition himself off little by little, to let people make their own mistakes and learn to walk their own paths without coming clawing back to him, it was only to try to salvage a tiny scrap of peace.

He reminds himself of that whenever he turns onto the A4. He tells himself that Leo is a series of exceptions he's made over the years, and this is just another one of them. He asks himself why he can't let go.

And then he drives, and he spends two hours unwinding it bit by bit: He's allowed to hang onto one thing in his life, it isn't an exception if it's become as regular as a rule, there is no peace he's found that's greater than this, and he does it because he loves him. Simple as that.

 

 

 

 

("You're gonna get sick of coming out here," Leo says in a choked-off voice when he opens the door just three months into his tenure in Milan. 

Gigi only shrugs. "No." He cups Leo's face with one hand, watches the way he leans into the touch, sees the dark purple shadows on the thin skin beneath his eyes. It's true. He doesn't get sick of it. Doesn't even come close.)

 

 

 

 

The house is big. He still thinks it, even if his mouth stays shut.

It's mostly empty because he hasn't found the time to unpack. That's what Leo claims, anyway. Gigi keeps every rebuttal trapped under his tongue: _Is that so? Since when are you at a loss for free time? And if that's the case, then where are the boxes?_

Still. He's a good man, but not a great one, so he looks at the same low table in the entryway with the same empty white vase and the same collected dust. "Minimalism really does suit you," he says. He tries to sound serious, genuine. The corners of his mouth twitch upwards and give him away. Leo's hand still clasped against the back of his neck grips harder, gives him a little shove. 

"Claudio sent me a design blog that mentioned _clean lines_ ," Leo retorts before grabbing Gigi's bag and taking the stairs two at a time. "Negative space. Shit like that!"

Gigi grins and watches him go. "I'm sure he did."

 

 

 

 

(It's his final season. He spends more time off the pitch than he has since South Africa, since he cried like a child on the phone to his mother convinced his career was over. It's nowhere near that serious this time, of course — just a calf problem, but it heals slowly. Everything about his body feels slow these days. Sometimes he thinks he could keep playing until he's eighty, but times like these — with his bad leg propped up on Leo's lap as he half-watches some awful action movie Leo loves — he mostly thinks he's getting a little too tired.

Leo's fingers circle his ankle, move softly against the fragile muscle that runs down the back of his leg. He's strangely gentle when he wants to be. Gigi shuts his eyes, turns his face into the pillow and tries to sleep.)

 

 

 

 

Things get easier after retirement.

They don't have to live by the careful juggling of training-free days. Gigi can stay for longer than a night or two, and weekends are back on the table. He signs on as a club director right after the World Cup, but truth be told, there isn't nearly as much to it as there was when he was on the other side of the stands. He's free to roam, to travel more casually than he could before, and that's great, it's _fantastic_ — it just seems that he keeps ending up on the road to Milan.

He stays during the week, through training sessions, through Saturday evenings at San Siro, through recovery, right through until it starts all over again. He starts staying even when Leo's gone for away matches. Leo never says it outright, but Gigi can tell he appreciates it. Waking up with someone. Saying goodbye to someone. Coming home to someone.

Slowly, he watches Leo come into his own — so slowly, he's sure Leo himself is the last one to notice it. His head held higher as he adjusts the captain's armband before kickoff. His reflexes sharper, his tackles timed better, his mistakes fewer. A few goals stacked up to his name. The genuine joy creasing his eyes when he lets his teammates envelope him. Milan, firmly in the running for a Champions League spot for the first time in years.

When they write about him, they chalk his abysmal first season up to growing pains — Milan's and his own. Occasionally they point out that he had to relearn a defensive system that didn't include the same pillars he'd known for six years. If he looked like a shit footballer for a while there (and he did) it was because he was busy rebuilding the entire foundation of his playing style. The journalists less obsessed with clearance stats and more in tune with speculation posit that it could have been mental all along. He made the move abruptly; maybe he just needed time to settle in, the way any person would. That scratches a little closer to the truth, Gigi thinks, but the reality of it is much simpler than all that.

For as long as Gigi's known him, Leo has never been good at being alone.

 

 

 

 

(The weak spring sunrise casts a strange halo of light over Leo's head, and Gigi finds himself trying to count every short hair, hopeful the monotony of it will drive him back to sleep. In less than a week they'll be in Rome, facing off in the final, and half of both of their teams would kill them if they knew where they were.

He watches the slow rise and fall of Leo's back, bare and pale as the bedroom itself. He stares around — the bed, the low dresser with nothing atop, the closet half ajar. He thinks of Leo's room back in Turin and wonders what happened to the plush reading chair, the photos he kept on the walls, the desk strewn with papers from half-considered coursework. Someone else lives in his house now, so it can't still be there. Maybe he shoved it all into storage and drove away. Maybe he threw it out. Gigi never asks.

Juventus take their victory with little trouble, the one easy win in a long, exhausting season. He kisses the trophy, drives to Milan two days later, and kisses Leo with just as much reverence.)

 

 

 

 

He starts with necessities, because if he's going to spend more than half of every month in Milan, he's not about to drink that much instant coffee. How Leo's survived this long without an espresso machine is beyond him.

He puts together a dining room set while Leo is with the team in Verona, calls Claudio for advice on what to put in the center. ("Fruit is tacky," he says, which mystifies Gigi because he's pretty sure fruit is just fruit.) He finds a box in the hall closet with Leo's movies and games, fills the empty entertainment center with them and dusts off the television. He buys new bath towels because he wants to, organizes the linen closets because he can. It fills the day, and every time Leo comes home to a new development, Gigi catches sight of him grinning out the corner of his eye.

It starts to feel less like a transient place to visit between trips to Milanello, a barren echo chamber of Leo's own loneliness. Maybe it still doesn't quite feel like _home_ , but Gigi keeps prodding at the edges of that concept, easing Leo into it.

"Retirement really bores you to death, huh?" Leo says when he returns from training and finds Gigi hooking up a frankly absurdly large wine refrigerator. "Don't you have a job?"

Gigi's knees creak when he stands. "Turns out, Juventus runs itself just fine without much of my input." He's laughing as he says it, but there's a drop of truth somewhere in there. Leo isn't the only one adrift and aimless without the black and white stripes on his back.

 

 

 

 

(Leo shows up in Turin the night of his final match — shows up at Claudio's house, at the party Gigi couldn't stop them from throwing in his honor, and it's not clear who actually invited him. It's mostly fine. He and Steph do disappear for a bit and return with their arms around one another's shoulders, delirious with breathless laughter, Steph's lower lip split where it wasn't before, Leo clutching his side. Gigi can't condone it, but he's also not sure what else he expects.

"You should come back with me," he says later that night. He lays his cheek against Gigi's stomach and looks up at him, dark eyes glittering. His hands at Gigi's hips still, only one thumb moving in a small, soothing circle. "Where else are you gonna go. Russia?"

Gigi can laugh about it now, but it's still a knife between the ribs. He runs a hand over Leo's head and cups the back of his neck. "Maybe. What if I did?"

Leo laughs too, and it's such a rare and beautiful sound after the season they've both had. "You're not going to Russia." He noses at Gigi's hip, drops a kiss there, then another pressed against his palm when Gigi slides his hand to rest along his cheek. 

He's right, of course. The next morning Gigi gets a key to Leo's house, and that cements his summer plans.)

 

 

 

 

The couch is still the one Gigi sat on the first time he showed up at Leo's house after a miserable midnight phone call pried him away from Turin. He hasn't replaced anything, just added here and there. Simple things. Two bookcases slowly being filled up again, shelving for his medals when he's ready to unearth them, the soft gray blanket that rests over their laps.

"This is nice," Leo murmurs. He gestures vaguely around the room and doesn't offer up anything more.

Leo's never been one for words, and it's up to everyone else to read between the lines, interpret his actions, say the things out loud that he won't. Gigi tilts his head and grins at him, slow and indulgent. "You were lonely," he says, and it isn't exactly a question but Leo still doesn't answer it. He reaches out, curves his arm over Leo's back and pulls him in close. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. You just do better with someone else in the house."

The silence of the house is less empty and oppressive now. It's warm, humming, punctuated by the low noise from the Coppa match they've got on.

"You," Leo admits after a long moment. His face presses against Gigi's shoulder, muffles the sincerity of his words and masks the scent of wine. "Not someone. You."

And it's not like Leo needs to put it out there so plainly — Gigi knows, they both know, they've both known for a long time the immutable truth of the situation — but god, it's good to hear. Gigi drops his chin to kiss the top of Leo's head. Home isn't about the city, the house, the things inside it. It's something formless, somehow the exact size and shape of Leo curved against his chest.

**Author's Note:**

> \- IF YOU HAVE READ THIS FAR YOU PROBABLY ALREADY KNOW, but allow me to indulge a bit anyway: during summer 2017, leo abruptly transferred from juventus to ac milan for ~personal reasons~ and everything snowballed terribly from there. to say he had [a rough start](http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2740782-why-leonardo-bonuccis-transfer-from-milan-to-juventus-hasnt-worked-for-either) with milan would be a hilarious exaggeration. they made him captain upon his transfer, and true to form for italian captains i love, he shouldered all of milan's many failings alone. a completely reconstructed team hastily thrown together in one transfer window and a rotating series of managers has had more to do with their struggles than leo's fuck ups ever did, but. he's nothing if not a martyr. BUT AS OF WRITING THIS HE'S BEEN GETTING BETTER, MILAN HAVE BEEN GETTING BETTER, and despite myself i have a lot of feelings about leo slowly and painfully finding his place there and helping the team grow into something less disastrous. (and a lot of feelings about gigi finally letting himself relax after retirement. THE TWO GO HAND IN HAND.)
> 
> \- god willing this fic does not jinx anything re: coppa italia, but hey, this is how i (probably foolishly) want it to go down! juve vs. milan final, here we come.
> 
> \- yes gigi is now talking about staying for one more season but (throws confetti) I'M NOT GETTING MY HOPES UP SO LET'S JUST PRETEND HE RETIRED AT THE END OF 2017-18 IN THIS SCENARIO
> 
> \- [hey do you feel like being sad](https://www.si.com/soccer/2018/01/03/gianluigi-buffon-believes-leonardo-bonucci-regretting-his-move-ac-milan) cool great me too
> 
> \- thank you for reading!! ♥ as always, you can find me being sad about leonardo bonucci on [tumblr](http://strikerbacks.tumblr.com).


End file.
